‘A love letter’ to Wales

Police drama showcases culture, scenery of the country (in two languages)

LONDON — In the first episode of Hinterland, a police drama set in a tiny town in Wales, an elderly woman is reported missing, and the lead investigator, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Mathias (Richard Harrington), finds a clue in a local landmark.

The show’s creators, Ed Thomas and Ed Talfan, said the outlines of the plot, revolving around a home for troubled youth, came to them while visiting a mid-Wales spot called Devils Bridge, known for its roaring waterfall and an eerie bit of folklore involving an old woman, a loaf of bread and Satan.

“There’s a very deep ravine there, and it’s very moody and strange, and all the trees have moss on them,” Talfan said. Near the falls loomed an 18th-century stone hunting lodge that had been converted into a hotel, he explained.

“We decided very early on,” he added, “if that would have once been a children’s home that would be really creepy. In a way, the idea for the pilot came as much from us responding to a very specific location as it did from having a story in our heads about an old children’s home.”

It is no accident that much of Hinterland unfolds in dark storybook settings. When Thomas and Talfan, who are both based in Cardiff, Wales, were trying to find financing for the series, part of their pitch to S4C, which bills itself as the only Welsh-language television channel in the world, was that Hinterland wouldn’t just be about gruesome homicides and evildoers, it would also showcase the culture and scenery of Wales.

Television series like the Danish hit Forbrydelsen (on which AMC’s The Killing is based) and the moody British whodunit Broadchurch, their reasoning went, proved that there was an international appetite for murder mysteries set in an unfamiliar gothic landscape with a brooding, loner crime solver.

“We told them that every broadcaster needs a detective to call their own,” Thomas said last month, sitting with Talfan at a private club in London.

And in many ways, this Celtic noir cop series doubles as a travelogue showcasing the country’s sweeping seashores, craggy cliffs, insular village societies and ancient, consonant-heavy dialect. That may be one reason the show was a hit: About 350,000 people watched the English-language version when it was shown on BBC One Wales in January, “more than double the viewers in Wales for any other TV program shown at the same time,” according to a BBC statement. In the United States, Acorn Media released the show on DVD last month, and it will be offered on Netflix in September.

In an effort to make Hinterland more broadly appealing, every scene was filmed twice: once in Welsh, and once in a combination of English and subtitled Welsh. The all-Welsh Y Gwyll (which means The Dusk) ran last year on S4C, followed by the alternate version, Hinterland, which aired in Wales and the rest of Britain and features actors reflecting what conversation sounds like in predominantly bilingual far-west Wales.

But even though Hinterland and Y Gwyll share the same dialogue, actors and story lines, the two versions offer slightly different performances and varying amounts of hand waving. “I found myself gesticulating more in Welsh,” Harrington said. “It’s a more melodramatic language. You cannot not go there. Welsh is more poetic. You can get to places a lot quicker with just using a few words, or sometimes just a vowel sound.”

Which isn’t to say that Harrington, who spoke Welsh as a child but let his fluency lapse, wasn’t challenged by the linguistic demands of the role. “At the end of the job, I could scramble an egg with my tongue,” he said.

During the roughly seven months it took to make Hinterland, which was shot almost entirely in the coastal county of Ceredigion, the cast and crew had to endure the area’s extreme changes in climate.

“The weather was biblical, almost ridiculous,” Harrington said. “If a plague of locusts showed up one afternoon, I wouldn’t think about it. There were days when it was so cold, my jaw wouldn’t work.”

When told that the actors’ chilled look added an air of authenticity, he replied dryly: “It lends itself to a certain amount of magic. But it becomes a problem when you can’t move your fingers or speak.”

On the other hand, muted by freezing temperatures, Harrington was a man not expected to divulge any secrets. Aside from him, Thomas and Talfan, no one in the cast knew why the gloomy bearded detective came to be forced out of his position in London and reassigned to the remote Welsh hamlet of Aberystwyth. At the end of the initial four-episode run, the audience doesn’t know much about him either, other than that he’s an avid jogger, lives alone in a beat-up trailer and might have an estranged wife and two sons.

“We enjoyed the fact that the character is a damaged man, and that he’s an enigma,” said Talfan, who seemed relieved that Hinterland was a huge hit in Wales. He promised that more will be shared about Mathias in the second season, which starts filming next month. “We knew it could come back and smack us in the face. Happily, it didn’t.”

As glacially paced as aspects of Hinterland can be, no one can deny that Thomas and Talfan have kept to their promise of showing big swaths of Wales largely unseen. “Every location we went to, and they were all spectacular, the owners would say, ‘No one has ever filmed here,’” Talfan said.

Then Thomas quoted one of the Hinterland producers, Gethin Scourfield. “He said, ‘It’s like we’ve made a love letter to a disappearing Wales.’ And it kind of is. The Welsh language is diminishing because young folk move to the city. We found communities that aren’t going to last forever. Recording that and finding stories that reflect that in a gentle, nonpreachy way is kind of interesting.”